11 January 2026

As we head into mid-January, I’m finding myself uncomfortably empathizing with our volatile weather, alternating heavy rain warm enough to melt much of what had been a lovely (and brightening) snow cover with dropping temperatures that freeze my sloping backwards question mark of a driveway into a contorted luge course, making me even more chary than usual of a fall.  In our crippled democracy, the horror hits just keep on coming, the latest the Minneapolis murder of Renee Good.  My friend Carol was part of the protest in Dover yesterday, a photo of her and her sign (“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS!  STAND UP NOW OR BOW DOWN LATER”) made USA Today.  I, on the other hand, worrying about ice on the road as well as trigger happy ICE agents, went to Portsmouth not to protest but to see Ethan Hawke’s remarkable performance in Blue Moon.  Wonderful script, acting, direction; devastatingly heartbreaking.  Perhaps not the best choice to experience on a dark, cold day as I struggle with death cleaning resolutions and the ever more noticeable drag of aging.

Today I went to a new year’s luncheon with many of my fellow Seacoast Village Project members, all of us hoping to be able to “age in place.”  The noise of so many simultaneous conversations was deafening and defeating, especially for our hearing-impaired cohort.  Missing one couple, fellow retired UNH academics I was looking forward to seeing, I learned the husband has been metaphorically kneecapped by sudden onset memory loss so aggressive that the couple has decamped to Connecticut to be closer to children.  There was much talk of “being on the list” of our local continuing care facility, Riverwoods, awarded the sobriquet of “Neverwoods” by one fellow Villager, cleverly summing up what seemed to be the prevailing attitude.  I count myself one determined never to leave our home, but staying here will take a LOT of finessing.  And what if I’m on the short list for losing MY marbles?  My lunch companion, a former dean at Syracuse whose expertise in the intersection of business and technology wafted him and his wife to a teaching gig in Switzerland for 22 years (The Beauty!  The Wealth!  The Social Services!) finds promise in a remarkable mobility device (see revimo.care) that can lift you up, move you around, and basically take the place of a strong human orderly.  Provided, of course, that you keep enough marbles to be able to drive it.

In the coming week I am at last cleared to return to the yoga classes I’ve been missing since the hernia repair that sidelined me at the beginning of last month.  I’m hoping they will help alleviate the stiffness that sets in when I’m less mobile, and dispel some of the gloom attending my death cleaning, which arrived in earnest when I began the long-avoided task of sorting my late husband’s papers, beginning with a stack of personal emails he printed out and kept from the time we moved into our home in 2001 until he was overtaken by the debilitating anxiety that so altered both our lives beginning in 2006.  A couple days ago I heard on NPR a report about a woman, age 102, whose children had unearthed in a storage space a trove of letters to their mother from her fiancé who died in WW2.  She had put them away, married a different husband, had and raised their children, and never looked back at the letters until those children brought them to her.  At which point she read them, and fell in love with her long-dead fiancé all over again.

This is both heartwarming—the heart IS a resilient muscle—and heartbreaking, and best describes what it’s been like to find my David, once again his full, remarkable self, in his lengthy correspondence with his brothers, his friends, his daughter.  Witty, entertaining, and thoroughly engaged with all manner of subjects—music, movies, art, politics, the family romance, the woes of academia, astronomy, cars—they bring him back to life for me to adore and mourn afresh.  Many of the correspondents are, like David, gone now.  Some live on, and in a few cases when I think that person might like to have that letter, I’ve put it aside to pass along.  Other letters that describe in detail one of the Andrew Murphy Commonwealth’s many adventures—some of which I had forgotten—I’ve kept for myself to re-read when I want to, or simply need reminding of just how much extraordinary fun we had together.  The rest go to the silence of recycling.

Meanwhile I still await the new computer system that will replace the only sporadically working laptop I’m using to tap this out.  Even it has little epiphanies to offer by way of the scenic views that thanks to Windows Spotlight show up on the lock screen after the Dell logo.  The other day it was Delicate Arch outside of Moab, Utah, where we hiked so boldly at least twice, the first time in 1993 when we took the decidedly not marked path back to the parking lot by directly descending the steep sides of the red rock bowl below the looming Arch.  And then the very next time I turned on the laptop, the scene was the naturally terraced travertine pools of Pamukkale, the “cotton castle” atop which the ancient city of Hierapolis, founded as a thermal spa in the second century BCE, sits.  We were there together in 2013.  We had a wonderful life. 

So on we go.  I’ll continue salving my nostalgia with art:  tomorrow the Winslow Homer watercolor show at Boston’s MFA, next Saturday the documentary film of Robert Reich’s Last Class, next Sunday a well-reviewed production of Is This a Room? at Chelsea Theatre Works, Tina Satter’s true-life psychological thriller, a verbatim FBI transcript of the interrogation of Reality Winner, a young Air Force linguist accused of leaking a classified document about Russian interference the 2016 U.S. elections.  And George Saunders has a new novel coming out on the 27^th.  In the meantime, I’ll keep watching re-runs of The West Wing on Netflix, a vision of what it would be like to have super intelligent, ethical, heroic political operatives running things.  I’ve made it to Season Three, gobsmacked by the topical prescience of the first two seasons, 1999-2001, which inversely, sadly illuminate the world we live in a quarter century on.  What’s to come is still unsure; I think it will get worse before it gets better.  But on we go.